At the Vera List Center, we are deeply inspired by the life, artistic practice, and spirit of Lorraine O’Grady, who passed away on December 13, 2024, at the age of ninety. Lorraine joined the center as a VLC Fellow in 1997, and her work has shaped and affected who we are ever since. It will continue to do so beyond this moment as we celebrate her indelible legacy.

Since our founding in 1992 and the appointment of the first VLC Fellow, Maurice Berger (1956–2020), the Vera List Center Fellows have been at the intellectual core of our work. In 1997, Lorraine O’Grady was only the third fellow—and the first artist—to join what has become an international cohort of nearly fifty politically-engaged artists, curators, and writers. Under the stewardship of the Vera List Center’s first director, political scientist Sondra Farganis, O’Grady curated four panels on feminism and race during her fellowship. Each gathering took up a keystone or topic that had gone amiss in conventional art history narratives; O’Grady was thus articulating and claiming a historical lineage for both her own practice and that of her peers. Under headings such as Not For Sale: The Legacy of the Feminist Art Movement (February 1998), Miscegenated Modernism: The Black/White Co-Creation of 20th Century Culture (September 1998), The Resurrection of “Live Art”: What Kind of “Life” Will It Be? (Spring 1999), and Art and Politics: Women in Theatre (March 2000), they brought together such greats as Coco Fusco, Howardena Pindell, Kristin Styles, Michele Wallace, Judith Wilson, Martha Wilson, and the Guerilla Girls, among many others.

These panels changed how we at the VLC think about intersections of feminism, modernism, and performance art, and raised questions as pertinent today as they were then: Is it time for cultural historians to erase DuBois’s “colorline?” Or do notions of modernist hybridity, collaboration, and “racial masquerade” need to be interrogated in light of stubborn, race-based power differentials? Do cross-race cultural dialogue / transformation / exchange work in the same way and to the same degree in different disciplines? Mining alternative conventions of history and tying them to contemporary political urgencies, O’Grady was continuously provocative, honest, demanding, and extremely generous.

O’Grady was also a friend to the VLC and other VLC Fellows—having hosted us at her Westbeth Studio—and participated in many programs over the years. In 2018, we celebrated twenty-five years of VLC Fellowships with the program ART, An Index to (see also POLITICS). In the accompanying publication, reflecting on her early collaborations with the VLC, O’Grady said:

When I received the VLC Fellowship in 1997, it’s safe to say that few in the art world knew who I was. The award was a much-needed confirmation that the work I would do over those two years might be interesting and important. At least it was risky. […] Recently, I reread the titles of the four VLC panels I did—which, at the time, had felt a simple respite from the studio. […] Perhaps the Vera List Center’s most lasting gift has been the conjunctive phrase, “for art and politics.” It would support my instinct that political art, misunderstood at the best of times, could be a solid base for career and life.

Barely a year ago, we had the enormous pleasure of presenting In Common: New Approaches with Romare Bearden, co-curated by the Romare Bearden Foundation and the VLC as part of the initiative In Common, spearheaded by The New School’s Institute for Race, Power and Political Economy (presented from November 2023 to January 2024). The exhibition juxtaposed Bearden’s activist print works and their resonances with contemporary artists—and of course O’Grady was part of it. Commenting on her relationship to Bearden, O’Grady observed in the exhibition catalogue that, “like Bearden, I am trying to make the invisible visible,” and selected four diptychs from her Cutting Out the New York Times series from 1977/2017. She declared the arrangement of diptychs a political position: “When you put two things that are related and yet totally dissimilar in a position of equality on the wall, they set up a conversation that is never-ending. That ‘both/and’ lack of resolution—the acceptance and embrace of it, as opposed to the Western ‘either/or’ binary, which is always exclusive and hierarchical—needs to become the cultural goal.”

We mourn the loss of Lorraine O’Grady but hold her work, memory, and words close as a source of inspiration and a testament to our commitment to artists who share in her boundary defying ethos.